Life & Research Notes

The past couple weeks I’ve had a few nice paper prototyping sessions. It’s fun to create little modular UI components and then rearrange them, almost like a game.

I’m drawing inspiration from a couple nice references people have shown me. Jess pointed me to this Vimeo design (which I would include here, except it’s all rights reserved). It’s a really nice, clean style, and I know I like Vimeo’s feel, so I’ve been looking through this whole series.

And then I really like the mock interaction approach in this one (via Deeplinking):

We’re now making some screencasts of clickthroughs on top of the paper. Hopefully we’ll get a few up online soon. They’re a lot rougher/messier than these, but watching the mouse click and interact with the paper UI is really satisfying. It’s a fast process to create this stuff, and users pretty much get it right away, so it seems like a nice way to get feedback quickly.

Just learned about the Internet Health Report, which sort of helps me understand why everything is so slow today. It is like the knowledge worker equivalent of watching a storm on doppler radar.

If the internet went away, what would happen? I need to start learning some other skills.

Visnu showed me a nice, fast way to batch rename a bunch of files in bash. For example, to quickly replace xxx with yyy in all filenames:

for f in *; do mv $f ${f/xxx/yyy}; done

You may want to test it first:

for f in *; do echo $f ${f/xxx/yyy}; done